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**note: Bill is currently guest blogging on manspeak. This is the first of several posts he will be making, so keep coming back for more!

1 Corinthians 16:13, “Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.”

As Paul concludes his first letter to the Corinthians, he exhorts them. He tells them to be on the alert. OK, no surprise there. We are familiar with Paul’s athletic metaphors and we can easily hear a coach yelling at us to ‘Stand firm’ or ‘Hold the line’. Again, no surprise. Even ‘Be strong’ seems completely spiritual and pretty standard fare from the great apostle. Though I think all of this sounds like a men’s meeting…it isn’t exactly chauvinistic.

But ‘act like men’? As opposed to what? Is Paul saying ‘Don’t act like women’? That doesn’t sound…popular.

First, let me stand up strong for Paul’s high regard for women. He makes it clear repeatedly in his letters (e.g., Galatians 3.28, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ.’) that in what matters to God and us – being united to Christ by faith and so declared righteous in His sight – men and women are equal in value and importance. This cannot be disputed.

But this doesn’t imply that Paul did not think of men and women as having differences. In fact, he repeatedly taught that they were different and were to have different roles in the family and in the church (e.g., Ephesians 5:22-24, “…Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.”)

I saw all this to introduce a story a great friend of mine and pastor, Rick Holland, told me about…pig hunting. Now I know I will probably here from thousands of female pig hunters…but I think this is a ‘man’s story’. Consider it for yourself:

“I was on my annual pig hunt this last weekend when I had an interesting encounter. My hunting partner shot at a pig about 10:00 AM. We went to check for blood and found none. We assumed he had missed and went to another canyon a few miles away to hunt it. We saw nothing in that canyon so we came back to the one where he had shot at the pig earlier. It was then 2:00 PM.

A few hundred yards away from where we thought he had hit the pig, we found a blood trail. We followed it for another hour (it’s now about 3:00 PM). I was on my hands and knees looking for small drops of blood that were about 10 yards apart… when it happened….

I heard something ahead of me as I was crawling out from under a Scrub Oak. I looked up and the 200lb boar was coming at me at full steam. He obviously was not dead!

He was on me so fast I could not ready my rifle and he hit me in the thigh at full speed. The boar was trying to get at my leg with his 5-inch tusks and I had to use the stock of my gun to push is head down. I ended up falling on his back with my legs on his head. He then flipped me (full summersault!) and I landed on my back. The boar kept going toward my friend who was about 15 yards behind me. He heard my yell (actually more like a scream) while I wrestled with the pig and, according to his account looked up to only see my feet five feet in the air. I yelled to him that it was coming his way. He had time to chamber a round and hit it in the head. My prayer life in those seconds was very active and it has been sweeter ever since… What a God we have!”

I think Paul would recognize this as a man’s story. I think he would say, ‘Yep, that’s acting like a man’. Of course, he didn’t mean for the Corinthians to be pig hunters! But he did know that men act differently than women and in the life of the church he needed men to ‘act like men’ in more important ways as the Corinthians faced the challenges ahead. He needed the unique ways men differ from women to be worked out in the life of the church just like he needed the unique contribution of the women.

Paul knew that when men and women act like men and women the church benefits.